Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/282

 264 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

and more complemental .... as the societary /«ic«^ becomes more fully aware of the potential aims comprising the social policy.

Again (p. 140):

The consciousness, among the ruling tendencies, of active or latent quali- ties or conditions incompatible with the potential type .... is the character- istic antinomy of this aspect of social evolution.

Again, on p. 163, "personality" and "the social tendencies" are referred to in company with, and apparently in distinction from, "the community," as being guided by synthetic ywif^w^w/J in the selection of the means of social realization, and (p. 241) we read: "Social selection may be defined as the preference of the social process for the type that normally tends to prevail."'

All this personification of an abstraction is more than a figure of speech. It may lead the persons who practice the corresponding habit of thought to ignore concrete realities and to put in their place arbi- trary mental constructions. The present author has succumbed to this temptation. I might accordingly state my case against the whole method illustrated by this book by charging that it tends to substitute conven- tional, arbitrary, unreal concepts, as subject-matter and material for conclusion, for the real concepts that must be the subject-matter of objective science. The method is then not objective science. It is the systematization of fictions. For instance, " the type of person recognized as entitled to control in the family, the class, the community, and the nation" (p. 103). This is a philosopher's conceit. It plays absolutely no r61e in the real world. No flesh-and-blood man ever wrestles with such a concept in the business of life. We deal with individuals and concrete things and conditions. We must "keep off the grass," if the city ordinance says so; we must "move on" in the crowded street, if the policeman has orders to make us; we must pay an income tax, if it gets to be the law of the land ; but it is the rare specialist only who ever thinks to generalize these incidents of life, or who discerns in them any relation to "types" of any sort. The illusion to which such writers as the present author yield is that the real world has conducted its affairs after philosophers' fashion. It is the illusion that men have had in mind, before action, the same estimate of their acts which philoso- phers pass after the event 1 It seems hardly possible that any man in his right mind could deliberately maintain that this is the case. Yet Dr. Crowell's main thesis amounts to this. Unless he holds to it in this

■ Cf. use of terms " social spirit " and " social process " in quotation above from P-S9.